We lost a good developer to AWS, so now we’re poaching him back. He knows our office, so I’m hoping for at least a list of his coworkers who he’d recommend.

Spoiler alert: it’s already happened, and all the virtuous people already ascended to heaven.

Must be a gold rush for companies that use the AWS infrastructure. My company is already trying to poach a few AWS engineers, with a WFH or hybrid contract.

My Mizunos (Wave Riders) usually last between 900 and 1100 km. The moment I start having niggles in my knees or hips, I know it’s time to move them to my yard work rotation. Seriously, it’s not worth tisking an overuse injury running in worn-out shoes, especially ones that provide such a good value as Mizunos.

Ireland uses a variant of ranked choice voting. In essence, voters get a list of candidates for their voting district, and rank as many of them as they want in order of preference. When votes are counted, the candidate with the lowest votes is eliminated, and votes of those who ranked the candidate first are distributed to their second choice. Rinse and repeat until only as many candidates remain as there are open seats in the constituency.

There is still some inertia, especially in rural areas (“my dad always voted for this candidate, so I’ll vote for his son”), but the system still lends itself to more informed voting. From what I’ve seen in other countries, on average Ireland does a better job at electing more reasonable candidates than the US or EU countries.

You know how many bike stands could be built for that money? Dozens!

Deciding on the school for my master’s. Had two choices: the no. 1 school in the US at that time, or an up-and-coming pgogram. The top school would have set me back about 200k in debt, but I was virtually guaranteed a job with a starting salary of 150k+, and a career path to the C-suite. The other school would give me a free ride, but it was anyone’s guess where’d I end up. I picked the free ride, and ended with a dead-end job for 40k. That was 20 years ago. Since then, that job gave me the push to leave the US, settle elsewhere, find a wife, start a family, and have an exciting new job with career progression. The choice, when I was deciding, couldn’t have been more clearly defined, and for years I kept thinking what if I picked the top school. Not anymore…

Where’s the “four slices per freezer bag and keep in the freezer” option? Or am I just too good for this chart?

20C and sunny today, possibly the best beach day of the summer around here. And the local Starbucks had a sign up, saying that yhey ran out of pumpkin spice…

Two years ago, I quit FB for six months. Then I checked my feed, and counted six friends’ updates and zero group posts in the first 100 items. 94% of posts were ads or “suggested” content. So, I closed FB and never went back again. Whatsap statuses is where I find my friends’ updates these days.